


The Kill

by Tammany



Category: Sherlock - Fandom
Genre: Gen, Guns and Gambits, Love and Loyalty, M/M, Or maybe mystrade, Pre-Mystrade?, adventure story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-21
Updated: 2015-08-21
Packaged: 2018-04-16 09:11:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,456
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4619754
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tammany/pseuds/Tammany
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ok, I think you'll like this. It's an adventure, probably most like my "Steel From The Crucible," with Mycroft and Greg in the fire. Different situation, different threats, and Greg's off to rescue Mycroft this time, instead of the other way around.</p><p>It could be pre-Mystrade. Or it could be established relationship. It does not come up in ways that make that clear. This is more about their professional partnership and their adult work than about "Lurv," except that you can't love without it coloring the partnership. I think it does--but gently, and with a lot else to occupy our leads.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Kill

Greg knew the old, gutted buildings—an entire row of terraced workman’s housing in South London, near the river. It wasn’t quite his patch—he’d grown up south, in Brixton and Herne Hill, but he’d served as a constable in this area. He knew the terrain. Much of Soughwark was beautiful these days, upgraded and gentrified from its rougher self. This street, though, wasn’t.

He walked warily down the street, eyes passing over the windows—boarded windows scrawled with graffiti, glass windows with panes out and plenty of graffiti of their own, empty windows with a few jagged fangs left to remind the world they’d once had windows. Doors that had once been modest wood had long since been replaced with ugly steel, then the steel had been reinforced with bars hammered over to ensure they weren’t opened. There were “danger” and “scheduled for demolition” signs everywhere.

In theory there was no one in these buildings. They’d been evacuated too long ago—much too long, with demolition put on hold when ownership of the row of tenements fell into legal dispute. Lestrade was under no illusion about the place, though. People were inside. There would be crack houses, and the lowliest of whore’s flops, and beggar’s squats.  There would be runaway teenagers camping out in the attics and cellars, there would be old men and woman who couldn’t deal with the dole occupying the cleaner and more intact rooms. The tinkerers would have found ways to turn on the water and sewer without running the meters. Electric might be another matter, but people could live a long time without electric if the toilet flushed and the kettle could be filled from the sink. Greg had looked cautiously at an aerial view of the block on the web, and he was fairly sure someone with a good eye for overhead camouflage had been gardening back there, breaking up plantings and setting wobbly, shrubby rows, and hiding good plants among the weeds. No—there were people here. Dangerous people. Desperate people. Deadly people, in some cases.

Mycroft Holmes was here, for example.

Greg took his time finding the hidden entrances. He squinted and pondered as he squatted near the metal cellar doors in the back garden half-way up the row, hidden from the sky-cams by a big overgrown fir tree any responsible owner would have chopped down, sawed up, and hauled away years ago.

He knew how these old row houses were laid out. He knew where the passages breaking through the dividing walls were likely to be. He knew with near certainty where Mycroft was going to be.

Mycroft and his….what? Target? Prisoner?

Victim?

Greg grimaced, lips tightening. He had to do this very carefully, he thought. Do it wrong and it promised to be a martyrdom.

Only when he’d considered his route and his destination and how he must move between the two did he ease the old door open, swearing at the modest but unmistakable moan it made a it turned on its pins. He slipped down into the stairway into the cellar, easing the door back down above him.

He was dressed that night as he very seldom dressed—in the combat gear handed out to MI5 agents for covert black ops. Wet work. His jumper was thick and wooly, with leather patches, all of it sooty blackish charcoal grey. Under, not over, was his stab vest, hidden lest its various tabs and distinctive shape stand out. Sooty trousers. Black combat boots.

He carried a Glock 19 in a chest holster. John, he knew, liked a Sig Sauer. Greg preferred the Glock if he had to carry. He trusted it. A man might choose a Sig Sauer as a backup weapon, he thought—something for a pocket or tucked in a second holster in the small of his back. But if you only had one gun, you’d pick the Glock, now, wouldn’t you? The Sig was sexier, but the Glock knew what it was—a killing machine. It didn’t do pretty when it could simply be death in your fist.

He crept through the buildings, hovering and checking before moving through any door or gaping hole ripped in the walls. He could hear people rustling away, fleeing his approach. They left the remains of their jerry-rigged lives. Kettles still steaming on quickly blown-out spirit burners. Heaped piles of ragged, pilled bedding. Old grocery carts filled with the scant gleanings that mattered enough to be saved.

As he slipped into one room a terrified voice said, “Come any close and I’ll kill you.” The voice was young and high—could have been boy or girl. The figure hunched in the far corner where Greg could not have seen it until he was all the way in. The face? Again, it could have been boy or girl. Whoever it was made him think of Sally. The kid held a fucking monster of an automatic—more gun than anyone could use up in this shoe-box of a tenement. The gun wavered in an unsteady grasp. Where the hell had the kid got the gun from? Even the worst of the gangs preferred to avoid carrying, especially beasts like that…

“Not going to touch you,” he said, hands empty and flared wide. “Not going to hurt you….”

“Why couildn’t you leave us alone?”

He met the terrified, reproachful eyes—dark eyes, beautiful brows, sweet forehead rising up to a shadowy cloud of ringlets… “I am leaving you alone,’ he said. “You just don’t know it.” And then he was gone, through the next door.

He listened to see if the kid followed. Even without the one-man arsenal, he didn’t want someone creeping up on him. What lay ahead was going to take all his attention.

The room behind was silent. He crept on, then up when he found the stair in the next to last house. He’d guessed right, he thought. He’d find Mycroft up in the last attic room. It’s the one his enemy would have chosen—good view of the entire block, coming and going, possibility of multiple escape routes, including up and over the rooftops. Cold in winter and too hot in summer, but the little Irish weasel wouldn’t mind that. He’d already seen Afghanistan, and John Watson assured Greg that meant he’d seen hell already, and nothing else could scare him.

He wished Mycroft hadn’t come alone. If he’d brought backup, Greg would have known he was willing to let it play out the way the law demanded. Alone suggested Mycroft was siding with either vengeance or justice, which were another matter altogether.

“Sometimes the law is an ass,” Greg had told Mycroft once, trying to jolly him up a bit at the end of an op where the law had been satisfied—and justice had gone unserved. He’d flashed his best smile at the other man. “I know. Shakespeare says so.”

Mycroft had forced a death’s head smile, and said, “Actually Dickens has one of his less acute characters say so. I think you’re thinking of Dogsbody, though—he was affronted at being called an ass.”

“That’s a copper for you—all dignity, but he gets his quotes a bit muddled,” Greg had said.

But he knew then, and he knew now, that Mycroft, of all the odd crew that connected through Sherlock…

Mycroft was the one who cared that law and justice were not the same thing…and Mycroft was the one Greg feared would someday die in the attempt to reconcile them.

“I can come as backup,” John had said when Greg told him where he was going. He’d reached reflexively for the Sig Sauer Greg usually pretended not to know about. It was, as too often, tucked into John’s bloody parka pocket. A crappy way to carry a weapon…

“No,” Greg had said, giving the gun a wicked glare. “And put that away. The least you can do is provide me with plausible deniability.”

“Oooh, no, Commander, I had no idea he had a bloody piece with him!” John fluted, pretending to be younger and more innocent and more optimistic than Greg could recall any of them being in his life. “You shouldn’t go in alone,” he added, more seriously, even as he let his hand drift away from the pocket that held the gun.

“You have to stay with Sherlock.”

Neither said that until they knew if Sherlock were dying or living, someone who loved him had to stay near.

“He’s holding up well,” John said, but not as though even he thought that meant Sherlock was out of the woods yet.

“What’s that stuff do to him?”

“Gives him a rush. Kicks up his metabolism. Knocks out his organs if he uses it too long, or at too high a dosage.”

Both knew Sherlock had done just that. Like Icarus he’d flown straight for the sun.

“Moran should have left Sherlock out of it,” John said, voice ragged.

Greg wondered if the man understood that Moran would never leave Sherlock out of it—not when the true target had been Mycroft….the one Moran considered the real equal of his former superior.

“He’s a sharpshooter,” John said, even as he settled back into the plastic chair in the hospital waiting room. “He’s good at it. Don’t trust him if he gets a clear shot.”

He’d have a clear shot on half the world up in that attic. But if Mycroft had been clever like Greg had been clever, if Mycroft had slipped down back streets and taken shelter behind little sedans and shabby, battered delivery lorries, he could have reached the back garden and the big sheet metal door down into the cellars. He could have switched the odds on Moran.

And Mycroft wasn’t someone you wanted to trust with a clear shot any more than Moran was.

People amazed Greg. They swallowed the idea that fussy, dithery, priggish Mycroft Homles had been given the power he had been given without ever proving his competence in the field.

That was like making someone a battle general who’d never learned to fight or gone to war. It might happen—but no well-run bureaucracy would prefer it, and far too many experienced field agents would resist.

Mycroft could have stayed in the field. Sherlock insisted he was just too lazy. Mycroft didn’t squabble about it, though no one with any sense could see how hard Mike worked and believe he was anything less than a workaholic.

Mike could have stayed in the field. Instead he went back to his beloved Analysis department, and showed what a man with experience could do if you just let him see the raw data for a change.

He was still showing them—which was why Greg was quite sure he’d be blaming himself for all this. Mary Morstan and the child lost and on the wind. Sherlock drugged with experimental narcotics and left to die in a junkie’s lair, saved only because Billy Wiggins now knew a lot more than he once had—and did a lot of work for Sherlock and Greg and Mycroft that no one else knew about.

There were squirrels in the next to last attic room: a huge, ugly scramble of found materials heaped into a massive jumble under the eaves. The squirrels peered out at him. They were mutant black squirrels—supposed to be more aggressive than greys or reds. Their shining eyes followed Greg and they chittered and scolded.

So much for a sneak approach.

He eased the final door open into the last attic room.

“Don’t come in,” Mycroft said, his voice even and steady. “I’ve got him cornered, but he’d have a shot at you.”

“Yes, sir.” He leaned against the wall near the door, ignoring the chittering squirrels. He drew the Glock, prepared for the classic dive in followed by a tumbling roll and up to a braced kneel. Even if Moran took him down, it would give Mycroft the chance to finish the bastard.

“You should have stayed with the freak,” Moran called from further within the attic. “This should have been me and the Iceman. The final showdown.”

Greg was waiting, not intending to be goaded into moving too soon. He considered saying something sarky and dramatic, but chose silence. He’d won a lot of rounds by being the only player who could bear passing up a good line or a showy action. He could wait.

One of the squirrels crept out of the junk-heap nest. It was a brawny thing, and sleekly handsome. It inched toward him, chittering furiously.

Its teeth were a horrible yellow, and long.

Greg breathed, watching the squirrel for now. Later there might be something else to watch…

The houses below were coming alive…but Greg was pretty sure it was all rats fleeing the ship. Too many strangers had come in. There were too many weapons in play.

He hoped the kid would just put that burner down, grab his rucksack, and get the hell out. Maybe go back home to wherever he came from. Join the others running far and fast from the three angry, weathered warriors up under the roof tiles. He was too young for this fight. Too green.

There was a sudden rattle and scramble in the room beyond—something had shifted in the balance of power, Moran and Mycroft were leaping and tumbling into new positions.

Faster than fast Greg joined them, knowing they’d miss his entrance as they tracked each other’s movements. He was in luck—he rolled behind an overturned table to the right of the door.

“Moran, there’s no point. Greg’s here—the team will be sorting things out down stairs. Give it up.”

“And let you kill me?”

“Sherlock’s alive. Why would I kill you?”

“Because you know it won’t be over till you do.”

Greg knew that wasn’t enough to make Mycroft kill. He’d go round after round avoiding the kill if he could manage it. Killing was a failure to Mike…

Most of the time.

Not all of the time.

Moran was hiding behind an old steel filing cabinet in the corner of the room, pushed a little way out because it was too tall to fit under the low point of the eaves. The result was a niche Moran could tuck into and layers of steel between him and Mycroft.

Greg wished he felt safe turning in place, here behind the table. He didn’t have a shot at this end. He thought he might at the other. But to move might be to give away his advantage. Moran and Mike hadn’t noticed him coming in.

This was when the wisdom of silence demonstrated itself. They had no way of recognizing the silence of a man in the other room being intimidated by a black squirrel—and the silence of a man in this room preparing to ambush an enemy.

Mycroft was creeping along the side wall opposite Moran’s eaves. He had to be on hands and knees crawling, Greg thought. He could hear the shuffle and slide, soft though it was, and he knew Mycroft couldn’t be standing.  Like the filing cabinet, he was too tall to stand under the angle of the roof.

Greg eased his Glock free. He slipped a pack of cigarettes from his trouser pocket.

He flipped the pack toward the far back corner, away from him. Something fell over—first something light, like an old, cheaply framed poster. Then something heavy like an old standing lamp. In the clatter, the players once more moved—two in shock and dismay, the other with a satisfied smirk. Greg had rotated behind the table and now had a clear shot at the entire side of the attic Moran occupied. The Colonel might not come out now—but he would come out eventually. Then Greg would shoot. Until then he lay with his arm pillowing his head on the unfinished floorboards, listening.

“What was that, Holmes? Some clever stunt? But you always were the clever one,” Moran was growling and edgy. He’d squeezed deeper into his niche, squatting low on his heels. Greg could just see him, a shadow partially hidden by the edge of the file cabinet. He could just see the gleam of a gun.

Only an idiot shoots the gun, he thought. You shoot the man, not the gun. Shooting the gun ignores the fact that the man’s the deadly one. It’s showing of, and nothing more.

He waited.

The house was almost empty, now. A few footsteps rushing around. People crashing through the gardens. The rustle of the squirrels in the next room. The sound in this room had roused them, and he could hear them racing and scolding.

They scared him. Not that he would ever be able to admit it. They were rats in posh coats—but they were also killers. They were ripping the hell out of the formerly victorious grey squirrels that had been brought into England in the 1800s and that had been decimating the native red squirrels ever since.  Sally said they were tanked up on testosterone—he-man hulk squirrels pumped full of man-juice.  Greg didn’t know, but he knew they creeped him out, slinking and sliding through the city, watching everything with gleaming obsidian eyes.

Mycroft was silent, too, now. He’d found a place he liked, Greg thought. He was waiting his prey out. He could afford to—Moran might like to think he was holed up in a bunker, but the truth was he was pinned down—surrounded. At some point Anthea would figure out what was going on and send backup. Mycroft had tracked this place down and left the address. Greg wasn’t going to be the only ally, given enough time. Moran, though, was alone.

He could even feel sorry for the former Army officer. He’d been Moriarty’s good right hand for years—and he’d done what he could to hold the network together after. But he was like a lot of Army men: he liked a team. He liked a community. When Moriarty died, and then the network crumbled, he was lost, like John Watson had been lost before finding Sherlock. Nothing to live for. No goals, no mission to accomplish: Only to destroy Mycroft Holmes, who in the end had been the real power and the real enemy, and the real victor of the battle between Moriarty and Sherlock.

The sheen of light on Moran’s gun moved.

Greg was silent. Mycroft was silent, too.

Greg tried to estimate whether Mycroft had a shot. He didn’t think he did. Moran had to come further rout to be taken down.

He had a shot, though—not perfect yet, but… come on, Colonel. Come out. Just a little. Find your aim. Take your aim. Move to site along your weapon. Get ready to kill Mike…so I can kill you.

He rolled silently, and braced his elbows against the floor. He braced his wrist with his free hand. He took his time, he took his aim.

The fucking squirrels were going crazy, as if they knew what was about to happen—the guns, the smell of gunpowder and blood.

He drew his breathe and let it out and tightened his finger on the trigger.

Before he could fire a shot rang, too close, too loud, from the doorway, and the Glock rattled and crashed through the debris in the attic. Greg swore, Moran swore, Mycroft swore—and from the door came a high titter of laughter.

A shot rang from Mycroft’s corner. There was a yelp, and motion, and swearing.

It was the kid, Greg thought. The kid from downstairs.

“You idiot,” Moran growled, still tucked into his niche. “Idiot. Shoot the man, not the gun. Never the gun.”

The kid was whining with pain—and angry on top of it. “I fucking stopped him killing you.”

“Yeah, and he’s still  alive and you’re wounded.” Moran sounded caught between feelings—anger and disgust and worry. “How bad is it?”

“I don’t know.” The kid’s voice suggested it was worse than “I don’t know,” but better than “I know I’m dyng.”

“Where?”

The kid paused, trying not to sob. “Abdomen,” he managed.

“You mean gut.”

“Yeah, ok, fine, I mean gut,” the kid shouted, with a fear that told Greg he knew how bad that could be.

“You gotta get out of here,” Moran said, making it an order. “Go on—get. Get to a doctor or a hospital.”

“They’ll catch me.”

“I’ll come back for you when I’ve sorted this out. Now go.”

Greg wondered why he even bothered. The angle Moran had on the door—he could shout for the kid, take a shot, and be free of an injured handicap.

“You’re outnumbered,” the kid called, trying not to cry. It wasn’t clear if it was all pain, or shock, or fear, or something more.

“Go. Lestrade’s unarmed now. Holmes is badly placed. I’ll come through. I’ll come for you.”

The kid was creeping backward, slowly. By the sound Greg thought the injury must hurt badly—enough to slow the kid down.

He considered another wild leap, back out into the squirrel lair. He didn’t think he could make it. Even if he could, he wasn’t ready to face that automatic.

Silence, then. He reached for the small of his back, fingers stretching and flexing.

Then there was action—fast and hot, wild. Mycroft had apparently managed to move far enough to have a shot…but Moran spotted him even as he fired. In seconds the room was all motion and sound and shouts of pain.

Mycroft was hit. How badly?

“Mike?”

“I’m fine. ‘Flesh wound.’”

“Yeah—and it’s pretty much all either flesh or bone.”

Well—flesh, bone, or offal, and it was the kid who’d got it in the gut….

He’d heard Moran call out, too. Was he down?

No—there was a sliding step back under the eaves on Moran’s side, moving toward the door.

He’d lived. He was in motion.

“Mike, can you see him?”

“No. I won’t till he reaches the door.”

He’d be backlit by the light from the room beyond. It would be a good shot.

It was a shot Greg didn’t want Mike to take. It was a shot Mike would carry heavy, where Greg knew he could carry it light.

Mike was going to shoot for vengeance, or for justice.

Greg was damned well going to shoot for law: the sonofabitch was a clear and present danger, and he was going to take him out before he could complicate things more and put more people on the surgical table.

He drew out the Sig Sauer he’d borrowed from John and slipped into a holster in the small of his back, because the Glock’s the weapon you want if you can only have one—but the Sig was a nice choice if you could carry a backup.

He oozed around the bend of the table scanning the far wall. He found the shadow in motion. He saw the gun coming up--aiming not at him, but at Mycroft.

He found the center of Moran’s mass. He took his breathe, let it out, and pulled the trigger.

He’d made better shots. He wasn’t used to the Sig Sauer, after all. He thought it pulled left a little—but not enough to ruin his aim.

Moran went down.

Moran was going to stay down.

“Uncle Sebastian!” The kid in the other room wailed in fear.

There was no answer.

The kid was swearing, and there was a mad scramble in the other room.

Greg and Mycroft were both in motion then, dodging old chairs and wicker baskets as they raced for the door, weapons at the ready.

The kid was gone. The room was mad with squirrels. Greg screamed, unable to help himself, as one raced up his leg and over his shoulders and leaped from his head to a rafter, then back down into the fucking nest, where they swarmed and chattered like devils in the shadows. He brought the Sig up—then forced himself to lower it.

He was not going ot end this by empting his rounds into a squirrel nest. He wasn’t.

He looked at Mycroft. He snorted.

“Mike—you’ve got to get it right someday. Combat gear for wet ops, not evening wear. What the hell is wrong with you? You’re not James Bond.”

Mycroft, nursing his left thigh, glared at him. “I might have been,” he said. “If I’d wanted to.”

They laughed—the wild, breathy laughter of comrades after danger.

“Where’s the kid?” Greg asked.

“On the wind.”

Mycroft sounded grim. Greg frowned. “Who’s the kid,” he asked this time.

Mycroft shrugged, but his eyes were hooded and he was thinking. After a moment he said, “I think he’s Moriarty’s.”

Greg closed his eyes. “So it’s still not over.”

“Not unless he dies,” Mycroft said. Then he fished for his mobile, and called Anthea into action, shooting out instructions for the hunt for Moriarty’s previously unsuspected child. Shooting instructions for the cleanup to come.

“I would have managed it,” he said to Greg after he’d hung up.

Greg grunted. “You’d have hated yourself for it.”

Mycroft shrugged. “I’m rather used to it by now,” he said in a dry voice that suggested too many deaths.

“Yeah, but I could take this one and use my get out of guilt free card,” Greg said. “It was a righteous kill. The only safe way to resolve a standoff.”

Mycroft nodded.

Together they found the Glock. Together they made their way out of the house, Greg supporting Mycroft as he limped through the gutted buildings and out into the back garden. Together they greeted Anthea and her team.

“He’s up in the last attic,” Mycroft said. “Make sure Greg gets the credit.” He smirked and added, “We’re overdue to hand out a few St. George’s Cross.” Then, with true fear, he asked, “And Sherlock?”

She shrugged, her face neutral. “No progress. No loss, either. Dr. Watson’s pleased with the effect of the artificial kidney: it’s supporting your brother’s own body, and drawing out a lot of the drug.”

She wanted to call an ambulance for Mycroft. Instead he commandeered her own limo.

Greg accompanied him to the A&E.

“You didn’t have to follow me,” Mycroft said, between posh curses as the doctor tended to his leg.

“Yes, I did,” Greg said—and offered his friend his hand to clutch, as the doctor cleaned out the wound, and the blood flowed clean, and Mycroft leaned on Greg’s breast in trust he offered no one else—not even Sherlock.


End file.
